Let’s imagine for a moment. You’re playing in a tournament, and you’ve just been moved to a new table. On the first hand, you decide to raise pre-flop with a decent, but not great hand. On the flop, you have the top pair, and a decent kicker. You see your opponent, who simply called your raise before the flop bet out a significant number of chips. Looking over the board, you try to reason out what he could have. You have no idea how this guy plays. He could be super-tight, and he may have two pair or even trips. If he’s a little loser, it could be a flush or a straight draw, or he could have a middle pair. It could be a bluff altogether. How do you decide what to do?
Everyone has been in a situation like this before, and I think that learning what to do in these kinds of predicaments is what separates the consistent winners and professionals from the rest of the crowd. And that’s true both on a regular poker table and on the Judi Poker online platform.
My rule of thumb is simple: don’t play when you don’t know. Of course, as you may imagine, there are a lot of times where you can’t say for sure that you will know what’s going on in the game, and there is a lot of guesswork involved in the game of poker overall. You’ll go broke if you only wait for the stone cold nuts hands. Then again, you’ll go broke if you stay in every pot as well.
What you need to do is to train yourself to be less “sticky.” Sticky players are the guys who make a good hand and never let it die, even if they’re probably beat. Most sticky players will know they’re beat when they make that final call, but they keep on doing it time and time again. The problem is that they make the incorrect assumption that if they make their hand, they’ll win the pot. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case.
To avoid being sticky, you only need to do one thing: fold. This is a really easy thing to do, however, is one of the most difficult things for many people to handle. Nobody wants to be bluffed out of a pot, because then you look like an idiot for a few minutes. It also opens the door again the next time you get a pretty good hand that might be a winner. There are also those kinds of people who act like berserker warriors at the table, always charging into the fray, who think that folding is somehow un-manly. They tend to behave as though you can only win the war by winning all the battles.
Folding to a bluff is not a bad thing. Bluffs will work some times, and if it happens to you a few times, you’re not alone. The best players in the world recognize that giving in to a bluff is a fact of life, and that you can run from those skirmishes if it sets you up to win the bigger battles later on.
Eventually, you can hone your poker skill to the point where you know what to do based on the feel of the situation, but if you continue to end up on the short end of the stick, remember to use the rule!
